Avoiding Pre-Packaged Curriculum

I went into this week very nervous because it was my and Shae's turn for facilitation. As I stated in class, when we started planning for this past week, I wanted to have a definite, exact plan. For our activity where people shared quotes from the book and wrote down their reflections, I wanted to have all of the quotes chosen and typed out so we could distribute them to the class, ensuring that all of the main points we wanted to talk about would be covered through the discussion. As we were talking, however, we realized that if we chose each quote and told everyone what they were to reflect on, we were "pre-digesting" and "pre-packaging" the curriculum just as Ayers warns against in the text. We ended up having all of our colleagues choose their own quotes to reflect upon and then share with the class, and that ended up creating a much richer and more diverse dialogue than we could have ever tried concocting on our own. The same thing occurred when we tried thinking of an overall theme for the week. We realized that we were again attempting to be the leaders with all of the answers that we could then feed to the people that we were leading. We wanted to be able to find and tell the class what the theme was, but we came to the conclusion that we should take a note from Ayers and instead find the theme with the class as our discussion progressed and developed. We were able to have groups of three people do graffiti posters where they wrote down single words or drew pictures that they thought encapsulated the theme as individuals, and then they came together to summarize the theme as a group. When everyone shared their group themes with the whole class, I was so impressed by the creativity and deep thinking that went into each one. And I was yet again reminded that through the discussion and reflection that took place in the class, the themes that everyone came up with were much deeper and far-reaching than anything Shae and I could have developed before the class. This week was great for me because I feel that by leading the facilitation, I was able to try and put into practice a lot of what Ayers talks about in his book as far as being on an educational journey with your students and making sure to help interest and guide rather than dictate what exactly must be learned.